Erika is a former astronomer and current synthetic biologist. As an undergraduate at Caltech, Erika worked on topics in computational physics including space mission orbit design at NASA and computational protein design at D. E. Shaw Research. Erika worked with Kevin Esvelt at MIT during her PhD, where she used laboratory automation to tackle problems in synthetic biology. Erika leads an academic group at The Francis Crick Institute in London, UK, and is the the CEO of Pioneer Labs.
In 2021 she founded Align to Innovate, a nonprofit improving the reproducibility, scalability, and shareability of life science research with programmable experiments. Align hosts programs at the intersection of biology and automation, including the 2022 Bioautomation Challenge, the Protein Engineering Tournament, and the Open Datasets Initiative.